A Brief History of the Colloquial Title

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It’s a single line of dialog in Ernest Hemingway’s classic story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” but that one line, 11 words, has had an outsized influence on the course of literary titling. It’s spoken by the female character, Jig, as she waits for a train in Zaragosa with her unnamed American man. In the train station they begin drinking, first cervezas then anisette, and soon conduct a suppressed dispute about whether or not to end a pregnancy. Tensions mount, differences are exposed, and with that, Jig utters the legendary line. It’s a breaking point that is as much textual as emotional: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

Hemingway couldn’t have known the legacy that line would have — or maybe he did, he famously sought “a prose that had never been written.” When the story was published in 1927, the line broke open a new way characters talked on the page. Exactly four decades later, that groundbreaking colloquy resurfaced as a stylistic approach to the contemporary American literary title. Raymond Carver’s story, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” published in 1967 (the titular collection appeared in 1976), echoed Hemingway’s line, and in turn spawned a subgenre of titling in the vernacular style.

What I’ve come to think of as the colloquial title rejects literary tone for the purely voice-driven. Colloquial titles can be wordy, even prolix, and often make use of a purposefully curious yet catchy syntax. The colloquial title is based in common parlance, but also draws on aphorism, the stock phrase, and familiar expressions. For a more elevated voice-driven title, look to the literary/biblical allusion, the colloquial title’s highborn cousin. With exemplars like As I Lay Dying and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the allusion-based title has undisputed gravitas, and frankly, when it comes to authoritative tone, is hard to beat. Think of The Violent Bear It Away and A River Runs Through It.

And yet, ordinary language is equally capable of authority. Like any compelling title, those based in the vernacular can deftly portray a sense of foreboding, loss, or lack. Plus, when ordinary language is placed in a literary context, meaning can shift and complicate, taking shades of tone it might not otherwise. It might even be said that, unlike the conventional variety, the colloquial title is captivating even when its message is trouble-free.

There is a certain power in hearing phrases we know and may have used ourselves. When a title speaks to us in everyday language, it’s not so different from any voice aiming to get our attention. I read a colloquial title and hear a speaker with an urgent message. Maybe like Jig’s, its phrasing is odd, idiosyncratic. Or, where one speaker might as easily equivocate, another may cut in, or confess. Or be presumptuous and opinionated. Whatever the persona, the colloquial title leans in close and says I’m talking to you, and I listen, eager to know what lies beyond that strangely familiar voice.

Here then is a sampling of colloquial titles, culled from eight decades of classic and contemporary literature.

1. Classics of the Form An early example of the colloquial impulse is Horace McCoy’sThey Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1935). The title of this Depression-era portrait adopts ironic tone to reference the period’s human desolation and the suffering of its characters.

William Gass’s collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) uses the power of repetition to suggest a journey to the deeper realms of character and place. The recursive device proved influential, as demonstrated by more than a few of the examples that follow here.

Leonard Michaels’sI Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975) is an exemplar of the colloquial approach. The title seamlessly integrates the prose style of the collection and its mood of uncertainty and pathos.

Charles Bukowski’sYou Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986). Bukowski’s style pays a debt to the Hemingway prose style, to the confessional tone of the Beat Poets, and, to this reader’s ear, the personalized truth-telling of the ’60s.

2. The Aphoristic Vein
Common phrases and well-worn adages make ideal colloquial titles. Somehow, in a title, platitudes and cliché never feel stale, but spark irony and double-meaning.

Flannery O’Connor’sA Good Man is Hard to Find (1955). The title is drawn from a popular idiom of its day, and the homespun tone runs against the grain of the titular story’s mystical, violent drama.

William Maxwell’s novella So Long See You Tomorrow (1979) and Elizabeth McCracken’s collection Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (1993). Both operate on the familiarity of common parlance (and what might be called the gravity of goodbye), not to mention direct address: we read “you” and feel at once a stand-in for the addressee.

Jean Thompson’s collection Who Do You Love (1999). While a good number of colloquial titles take the form of a question, Thompson’s intentionally drops its question mark. The lyric from the Bo Diddley song is used without its original punctuation, shifting the phrase to an assertion, a stark refrain that echoes throughout the collection.

Amy Bloom’s collection A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (2000). Here, aphorism meets avowal and reflects the fierce attachments that occupy Bloom’s stories of youth, aging, loss, and hope.

Adam Haslett’s collection You Are Not a Stranger Here (2002). Another appropriation of dialog. Here, the outsider tone is a salutation that is both welcoming and sorrowful, and likewise defines the collection.

3. Matters of Opinion
This colloquial vein might be called the idiosyncratic declarative, a variety of title distinguished by off-kilter observation, unconventional syntax, and the frequent use of personal pronouns:

Lorrie Moore’s story “Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People,” from Birds of America (1998) reframes the declarative title as an ironic aside. Likewise, Moore’s formative “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” takes the conversational into a uniquely personal lexicon.

4. Be Forewarned
Everyday language can spawn titles of a more unusual sort, whether instructional, cautionary, or sometimes surreal. The style often has a portentous tone, and interestingly, makes frequent use of the first person plural.

Joshua Ferris’sThen We Came to the End (2007). This pronouncement marks many endings within the novel — of a century, a booming economy, a job, a relationship.

Ramona Ausubel’sNo One is Here Except All of Us (2012). Here, the title is foreboding, an augur that taps into the novel’s speculative, catastrophic history.

Matthew Thomas’sWe Are Not Ourselves (2014). The title is a literary allusion (from King Lear), referencing the novel’s characters who, as Thomas has said, “by dint of circumstances are not allowed to be themselves.” Karen Joy Fowler’sWe Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013), contains a voice-driven prologue that begins, “Those who know me now will be surprised to learn I was a great talker as a child.” It’s a perfect opening to a novel with a colloquial title that, in typical style, doesn’t hold back.

Lauren Alwan
’s short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Sycamore Review, in the short story anthology Art From Art, and elsewhere. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Writer’s Digest, LitStack, and in the museum of americana, an online literary review, where she is a prose editor. She lives in Oakland, Calif., and on Twitter at @lauren_alwan.

Why would anyone decide to write a novel in first-person plural, a point of view that, like second-person, is often accused of being nothing but an authorial gimmick? Here are a few novels that prove first-person plural is more of a neat trick than a cheap one.

With each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books.
Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular. Looking at the statistics that Amazon provides us, 48% of all the books bought by Millions readers at Amazon after clicking on our links this year were Kindle ebooks. This is an uptick from last year, when the percentage was 45%. In 2012 it was 33% and the year before it was 25%. It seems almost fitting, given the tug-of-war between book and ebook partisans, that the numbers would eventually settle out near even, with neither format coming out the "winner."
So, for all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices, here are some links to get you going.
For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals in 2013. If you are new to the ereader game, we hope you'll pick up these titles:
Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O'Connell ($1.99)
The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99)
They are also available on Apple and other platforms.
Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2014 (which you'll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Publishers appear to still be having luck pricing ebooks pricing near the magic $9.99 number that has been a focus for many in the industry (all prices as of this writing), though aggressive pricing on some backlist titles is clearly driving brisk sales. Occasional promotional pricing, a frequent occurrence in the Kindle store, has likely driven some of these sales as well.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ($6.99)
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose ($1.99)
Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter ($5.99)
Just Kids by Patti Smith ($8.62)
The Round House by Louise Erdrich ($8.61)
Tampa by Alissa Nutting ($9.78)
Fox 8 by George Saunders ($0.99)
A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor ($9.99)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ($6.99)
Underworld by Don Delillo ($11.74)
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury ($12.62)
Other potentially useful ebook links:Editors' PicksBest of 2014Top 100 Paid and FreeKindle Singles
And in this fractured ebook landscape, you've also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and the IndieBound ereader app that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don't forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics).
Happy Reading!

8 comments:

“No One Is Here Except All Of Us” is a strong contender for worst title of all time. It’s absolutely perfect as satire. I suspect this contemporary “colloquial title” phenomenon is mostly a young-writer deal, i.e., my novel is so precious and groundbreaking and awesome that I must give it a name that has never nor will never be used again by anyone anywhere in any context whatsoever.

That said, if any agents are reading this and would like to represent by novel “When I Said I Wanted To Just, Like, Order A Pizza What I Meant Was I Think We Should See Other People,” please let me know.

That’s a really interesting question Karl. It may well be that the colloquial drift is more prevalent with story collections—an effect of Carver’s influence. In researching titles, I found that with novels, the literary/biblical allusion did tend to show up more often, historically anyway. More recently, there seems to a wave of novels whose titles are based in the vernacular.

Don’t know if this is happening to anyone else, but that video ad recenters my window every time it restarts.

“my novel is so precious and groundbreaking and awesome that I must give it a name that has never nor will never be used again by anyone anywhere in any context whatsoever.”

Nah, that’s a pretty cynical take. My guess would be that this is close to 180 degrees off – that the more fatuous the title, the more self conscious the author is about the merits of the work. See the blister-inducing handwringing over Franzen’s “Freedom” and “Purity” – how dare he presume to be any kind of authority on such things. America is so post-ironic now that making any kind of gesture (“Everyman,” “Couples”) toward having your book stand for something is seen as self-aggrandizing effrontery.

This post gives a nice overview of the progression of this type of title. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is surely one title not mentioned here that is as influential as any in the last two decades – in America anyway.

For me the “We Are Not Ourselves”/”All the Light We Cannot See”/”In the Light of What We Know”/”Everything I Never Told You”/”The Sound of Things Falling” trend is just dreadful. Equivocating book-club bait (and it’s working!). Literary allusions or not, these titles are useless, and titles should not be useless.

There’s a line you have to walk when choosing a colloquial title. Most of the ones listed in section 1-3 are really good. (They Shoot Horses, in particular, is just perfect – bizarre, impactful, symmetrical(!)) But cripes, today’s new-release bookstands are totally clogged with the ponderous, samey, “royal-we” titles described in part 4. If I have to heave a world-weary sigh before I even read the cover, the alarm bells go off. This whole trend reinforces a shitty stereotype (one that know isn’t totally true) about the State of Fiction Today – that it’s become a cadre of self-serious, sulky middlebrows writing in the same competent-yet-boring tenor.

This year’s list is inspired by my e-reader, which I received last year as a Christmas present. It took me most of the year to incorporate it into my reading routine, but now, as more of my reading happens electronically, I’m feeling nostalgic for all things bookish and old-fashioned.

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month. For more March titles, check out the Great First-Half 2017 Preview.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid: In an unnamed city, two young people fall in love as a civil war breaks out. As the violence escalates, they begin to hear rumors of a curious new kind of door: at some risk, and for a price, it’s possible to step through a portal into an entirely different place — Mykonos, for instance, or London. In a recent interview, Hamid said that the portals allowed him “to compress the next century or two of human migration on our planet into the space of a single year, and to explore what might happen after.” (Emily)
The Idiot by Elif Batuman: Between The Possessed — her 2010 lit-crit/travelogue on a life in Russian letters and her snort-inducing Twitter feed, I am a confirmed Batuman superfan. This March, her debut novel samples Fyodor Dostoevsky in a Bildungsroman featuring the New Jersey-bred daughter of Turkish immigrants who discovers that Harvard is absurd, Europe disturbed, and love positively barking. Yet prose this fluid and humor this endearing are oddly unsettling, because behind the pleasant façade hides a thoughtful examination of the frenzy and confusion of finding your way in the world. (Il’ja)
White Tears by Hari Kunzru: A fascinating-sounding novel about musical gentrification, and two white men whose shared obsession with hard-to-find blues recordings leads them to perdition. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called White Tears “perhaps the ultimate literary treatment of the so-called hipster, tracing the roots of the urban bedroom deejay to the mythic blues troubadours of the antebellum South.” (Lydia)
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy: A memoir from an intrepid journalist who wrote, among other things, a truly unforgettable essay about losing a baby while on a reporting trip to Mongolia. The memoir documents the forging of an extraordinary career, her loss and its aftermath, and the disintegration of her marriage. The Atlantic writes, "She plumbs the commotion deep within and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation." (Lydia)
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion: Excerpts from two of the legendary writer’s commonplace books from the 1970s: one from a road trip through the American south, and one from a Rolling Stone assignment to cover the Patty Hearst trial in California. Perhaps the origin of her observation in Where I Was From: “One difference between the West and the South, I came to realize in 1970, was this: in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history. In California we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.” (Lydia)
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg: A novel about a 39-year-old woman taking stock of her life, from the best-selling author of The Middlesteins and St. Mazie. This one prompted Eileen Myles to ask “Is all life junk — sparkly and seductive and devastating — just waiting to be told correctly by someone who will hold our hand and walk with us a while confirming that what we’re living is true.” (Lydia)
Sorry to Disrupt the Peaceby Patty Yumi Cottrell: A singular debut describes a woman taking on the role of detective to account for her brother's suicide. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls the novel "complex and mysterious, yet, in the end, deeply human and empathetic." (Lydia)
Ill Will by Dan Chaon: Dustin Tillman was a child when his parents and aunt and uncle were murdered in his home, and it was his testimony that sent his older, adopted brother, Rusty, to jail for the crime. Forty years later, he learns that Rusty is getting out based on new DNA evidence. As that news sends tremors through Dustin’s life and the life of his family, he buddies up with an ex-cop who has a theory about some local murders. As often happens in Chaon’s book, you’ll be gripped by the story and the characters from the first page, and then all of a sudden you suspect that nothing is as it seems, and you’re sucked in even further. (Janet)
The Accusation by Bandi: For readers interested in a candid look at life in North Korea, The Accusation — originally published in South Korea in 2014 — will immerse you via the stories of common folk: a wife who struggles to make daily breakfast during a famine, a factory supervisor caught between denouncing a family friend and staying on the party’s good side, a mother raising her child amidst chilling propaganda, a former Communist war hero who is disillusioned by the Party, a man denied a travel permit who sneaks onto a train so he can see his dying mother. Bandi is of course a pseudonym: according to the French edition, the author was born in 1950, lived in China, and is now an official writer for the North Korean government. The stories, written between 1989 and 1995, were smuggled out by a friend — and will be available to us via Grove Press. (Sonya)
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge: Fiction meets history in The Night Ocean’s series of intricately nested narratives. A psychologist’s husband, obsessed with a did-they-or-didn’t-they affair between horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and a gay teenage admirer, disappears while attempting to solve the mystery. Set over a 100-year period and spanning latitudes from Ontario to Mexico City, this novel from New Yorker contributor La Farge promises to pull Lovecraft’s suspense into the present day with flair. (Kirstin)